TALAS E-newsletter – February 17

The talented students in band, choir, mariachi, and orchestra were selected from over 70,000 individuals who competed in the TMEA auditions.

The 15 SISD student musicians will attended and performed in various ensembles at the 2022 TMEA state conference Feb. 9 to 12 in San Antonio.

I am a mom, a literature professor and a former Texas high school English teacher. I write novels because of the students I taught in Houston in the early 2000s. The books they wanted to read weren’t in our high school library because those books didn’t yet exist.

I wrote the award-winning 2015 novel Out of Darkness with those students in mind. For six years, it was not challenged once. Now it has become a target for book bans and removals in Texas school districts and across the country.

A lot of people changed jobs during the pandemic. Pedro Martinez was one of them, leaving his position as superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District, which he held for five years, to lead the nation’s third largest school district in Chicago.

The political contexts could not have been more different for Martinez, who also chairs Chiefs for Change, a network of superintendents. He left a state led by a governor opposed to masks and hardline COVID protocols for a mayoral-controlled district with a powerful union determined to make sure schools were implementing all COVID mitigation measures. In February, he spoke with The 74 about standing up to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the impact of poverty on students during remote learning and hopeful signs that students are making up for lost learning.

Lynette Henley needed one more year to receive her full pension after 40 years as a teacher, but she couldn’t convince herself it was worth the risk.

So Henley, 65, who has diabetes and congestive heart failure, retired last June as a math and history teacher at Hogan Middle School, in Vallejo, California, which serves mostly Black and Hispanic children.

“You’re in a classroom with 16 to 20 kids and a lot of my students weren’t vaccinated,” said Henley. “I just didn’t feel safe. It wasn’t worth it to possibly die to teach.”

In an effort to get more accurate data on restraint and seclusion practices in schools, the U.S. Department of Education is proposing revised definitions for Civil Rights Data Collection reporting. 

The revisions come after education organizations, disability and civil rights advocacy groups, and the Government Accountability Office raised concerns about misreporting and problematic data in past CRDC collections, including some very large districts reporting very low rates of restraint and seclusion. 

Michael Vilardo and Felix Ruano are living the American Dream. After attending the nation’s top universities, they created an online learning tool that they hope, according to Ruano, “help kids who look like the two of us.”

Ruano, the son of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Los Angeles, California and attended public schools before studying at Harvard University and eventually landing a job at McKinsey.